Sunday, December 27, 2009

For Beginners Only

“Happy New Year” we say. The expression carries different meanings for different people, but I rather suspect that for most of us, it harbors the hope of a new beginning - a chance to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. Forget the messed up and mangled moments of the previous twelve months. Tear off the page from the calendar, and there staring you in the face is a fresh new year with a fresh new twelve months full of fresh new opportunities. The New Year brings both pardon and promise, amnesty and opportunity, a chance to drop the “if onlys” of last year and pick up the “next times” of the new year.

And notice: the New Year rolls around every twelve months. We even call it - don’t we? – new years, not new year. We don’t get just one chance to make a new beginning, we get many chances; and therein lies the “Gospel” of it. A good beginning is the kind you repeat many times, not just annually but daily– to get up every day and choose all over again to be the person God created you to be. Somewhere in his writings, where now I can’t remember, Frederick Buechner says that when he wakes in the morning he tries to remember that in a real sense it is his re-creation day. To be sure, THE creation happened in the distant past, but as Buechner arises in the morning to greet the new day, he reminds himself that the only “creation” that truly matters is today! And so he imagines himself waking from what he calls the “death of sleep” to greet a whole new creation and a whole new day and a whole new self created just for that day. It is as though God has re-created him all over again…just for today. Buechner says that when he arises in the morning, he tries to imagine God saying all over again what he must have said on Buechner’s birthday: “Let there be Buechner!” Not a bad way to get up in the morning, is it!

I know, I know, we bungled it badly last year, but that was last year. That was then, this is now. It’s “re-creation day,” time to begin again!

Hear the Gospel: There is no failure, no grief, no guilt, no physical, mental, emotional or moral darkness that lies beyond God’s grasp and grace and goodness. “Christians,” Jürgen Moltmann said, “are eternal beginners.”

And so, here’s a New Year’s blessing for 2010: Tear off the page, wipe the board clean, drop the “if onlys” of 2009, and pick up the “next times” of 2010. “Let there be (insert your name here)!” The Gospel is that God’s gracious “good news” is for beginners only.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Everything I Needed to Know (About Research) I Learned in the Seventh Grade

I’ve been grading final papers in my master’s classes. The students were to write a paper on an aspect of Paul’s theology – his understanding of the Torah, his pneumatology (understanding of the Holy Spirit), his hermeneutic (method of interpretation) in interpreting the Old Testament. My current crop of students tends to make the same mistakes students have made in this kind of assignment everywhere I’ve taught; namely, they confuse “research” with “book reporting.”

You see, at a certain level (high school; college, perhaps), it’s okay merely to report what the so-called “experts” or “authorities” or “scholars” have said about a subject, providing the reader with something of a “Reader’s Digest” or “Cliff Notes” version of the scholarly “consensus.” But in graduate school, where students are required to move beyond mere “book reporting” to real “research,” that’s no longer sufficient. At the graduate level, students are expected to sift the evidence themselves; draw their own conclusions; stake out a claim on the subject and climb out there on the branch with the others, as it were. And so, when I get a paper on, say, Paul’s pneumatology, that only catalogs (or worse, counts!) the views of the scholars on the subject as though that “settles it,” their grades suffer accordingly. That’s not “research,” I tell them; that’s merely “book reporting.”

Real research (irrespective of the discipline!) is evidence-based. As such it does three things: (1) it lays bare the evidence, as we now know it; (2) it follows the evidence wherever it leads; (3) it draws whatever conclusions the evidence demands. Period. Anything else is not “research.” I learned that (wait for it!) in the seventh grade at Canal Point Elementary School. That’s right, elementary school. My teacher at the time, Mr. Threlkeld, spent considerable time teaching us this wonderful method for acquiring truth called “the scientific method.” It was he who taught me to begin with the question and the evidence, rather than to “rig the results” by starting with the answer and ignoring the evidence. I cannot tell you how helpful that method has been to me through the years! I do not believe that I could do any serious thinking on any subject without it.

And that’s what I’ve tried to pass along to my students, wherever I’ve taught. I instill in them the fundamental notion that real research always conducts a “conversation” of sorts with the evidence. In the course of the conversation, it’s fine (indeed, even desirable!) to expand the conversation to include others who have looked at the same evidence (the opinions of the so-called “scholars”). But good research methodology always begins with the question, not the answer; with the evidence, not the scholars; with the primary conversation, not the secondary ones. I tell my students: “Until you’ve explored the evidence yourself, it’s best to lock the scholars out in the hall. Don’t let them in yet! If you let them in too soon, they’ll bully you, bias you, bludgeon you into their way of thinking. Begin your conversation with the evidence, not the scholars; and then, after you’ve carried on an extensive conversation with the evidence, it is all right to let in the scholars as ‘conversation partners’ and ‘colleagues’ with you. But do it too early, and you’ll only see what they want you to see!”

Unfortunately, it’s an error that is not confined to biblical studies – starting with the answer rather than the question; citing the opinions of the “scholars” as though that “settles it” without ever having explored the evidence. We’ve witnessed the same phenomenon in the field of the so-called “hard sciences” quite recently in the news surrounding the revelation that some “scientists” may have “doctored the data” on global warming so as to bias the evidence in favor of their preconceived perspective (read “answer”) that global warming is man-made. The case has been made, apparently with evidence, that some scientists (not all!), committed to the “answer” already pre-determined, conspired to drop from their research models any data that did not conform to their desired conclusion. When challenged at this point, their response has been curiously (and disappointingly) un-scientific: Well, even if we did fudge the data, the overwhelming consensus of the “experts” is that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. Well, that surely “settles it,” doesn’t it? We’re asked to trust the “consensus” of the same “experts” who fudged the data to begin with! I learned better than that in the seventh grade! Real research only treats the data as “evidence,” not the opinions of the so-called “experts” who can be, and often have been, quite wrong about their “assured results.”

Is global warming a natural phenomenon or a man-made one? I don’t know, but I do know this: Only the evidence will establish it.

And so, here’s a novel idea! Why don’t we start with the question rather than the answer, look at all the evidence and not just some of it, follow it wherever it leads us (whether it’s where we want to go or not!), and then draw whatever conclusions the evidence demands?

Mr. Threlkeld would be so proud.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

What Are the Odds?

The church I currently serve as Intentional Interim Pastor has a Christmas tradition of collecting and filling shoe boxes for the Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child Shoe Box Project. Each family is asked to get a shoe box and fill it with items that children in third-world countries might like to have as Christmas gifts – pen and pad, small toys, scarves for cold winter climes, flashlights, coloring books and crayons, stuff like that. On Christmas Sunday, the altar of the sanctuary will be filled to overflowing with the shoe boxes which will then be transported to Charlotte for eventual distribution to needy children all over the world. Our shoe boxes will join literally millions of others from all over the country prepared and distributed each year through the auspices of Samaritan’s Purse. It’s a good thing, and our church really enjoys it. But I didn’t know how good until I heard Franklin Graham, Executive Director of Samaritan’s Purse, tell this story.

Some years ago, Franklin Graham and his team were in war-torn Bosnia delivering their Samaritan’s Purse shoe boxes to children who had suffered the ravages of war and ethnic cleansing. Almost all of these children had lost someone close to them in the genocide. A woman with Graham’s team was passing out shoe boxes to eager and delighted little children when one little boy approached her. She handed him a shoe box and said: “Merry Christmas; Christ loves you.” The little boy replied: “But I don’t want a shoe box for Christmas; I want parents” (his parents were killed in the ethnic cleansing leaving him orphaned). The woman stammered: “I’m sorry, son; I don’t have any parents to give you for Christmas, but I do have this nice shoe box.” He reluctantly took it and opened it. Inside there was candy, crayons, some toys, a writing tablet, and in the bottom, the photograph of the couple who had prepared and given the shoe box the boy received, a childless couple who had been praying that God would give them a child. They enclosed a picture of themselves and on the back, their address. The boy wrote them to thank them for the shoe box, and they responded. Back and forth the letters went, until finally they decided to travel to Bosnia to meet the little boy. A few months later they adopted him and became his new parents.

What are the odds?

There were literally thousands of shoe boxes stacked up in front of the woman distributing them to a hundred eager outstretched hands. What are the odds that she would pick the one shoe box prepared by a childless couple praying for a child, and give it to the one little boy whose only Christmas wish was for new parents?

What are the odds?

About as much as a virgin having a baby, or a dead man coming back to life again!